So nice to have blooms returning to my hibiscus, sorry but I find all critters on my blooms disconcerting!! I wasn't getting any blooms for quite a spell there and it is neat to see the butterflies going to my hibiscus! Yeah had a yellow sulphur visit my double orange today...........I guess he was color blind. Glad you feel comfortable with your helper. Darren

Larry, Gophers really love sunchokes. Some people plant sunchokes merely to lure the gophers away from the potatoes. I know if I did that they'd just eat the sunchokes first and then go eat the potatoes anyway. I'd focus on using the castor oil or dropping castor beans in their holes and wouldn't waste my time planting a gopher purge plant. Studies, and anecdotal evidence as well, show that gophers do not leave because of the gopher purge plants and the plants often are very invasive. This weather has been great for the potatoes....cool just the way they like it and actual rain falling from the sky. The ones I planted earliest are growing by leaps and bounds, but the ones I planted latest haven't broken through the soil yet. The ones I pointed right in the middle of that time frame are up just a couple of inches out of the soil. I'm always so happy when I see them emerge....just to know that nothing ate them and they didn't rot in cold, wet soil. (I planted 35 lbs. of seed potatoes so that even if some of them didn't emerge, we'd still have plenty to harvest.) Jen, If it is only a single gopher, I'd trap it like Scott suggested. Often, though, you have more than one. They can make a mound further away from the garden and sneak in underground. We don't have a big problem with them at our house because we have cats that control them pretty well, but our cats are inside at night (to protect the cats from the plentiful roaming wildlife) so the rodents active at night can last a while until they stay out too late early one morning and a cat finds them. I don't know if you are in more of an urban or suburban setting or in a rural to semi-rural setting. If it is the latter, you may have meadow mice, aka voles. Voles are a big problem here at our house, although the cats control them about as well as it is possible to control them. It is just that the surrounding acres are full of them, so when the cats kill a few, more move it. It is a constant battle. We had moles in the beginning, but had a young male cat named Moose who wiped out all the moles, voles, gophers and field mice. The moles never came back, likely because we treated our yard for grubs using Milky Spore Powder, but the others try to come back constantly and our cats do a decent job of keeping them more or less under control. You can use a mole and gopher repellent. I'll link one below to show you what they look like. These use castor oil. You can apply it as a granular product or a liquid one and water it into the ground. It coats the plants with a bad flavor the gophers don't like and that repels them. It isn't a poison., just a repellent. Castor beans themselves contain one of the deadliest poisons (ricin) known to mankind, but the castor oil does not contain it. In fact, castor oil is sometimes used in the manufacture of chocolate.....I say that to make the point that the castor oil repellent is not dangerous. Castor beans are. I grow them, but handle the beans carefully....never leaving any lying around, for example, where they could end up in a container of edible beans. I grow castor bean plants as ornamentals, and have found that a row of them growing outside the fenced edible gardens keep the rodents away....but I don't have any small children here who might accidentally ingest a castor bean, and our cats don't chew on the plants. I don't grow any castor bean plants near the fenced dog yard since dogs like to chew on stuff, and our dogs are not allowed to roam outside the fenced dog yard unless they are with us and on a leash because we have too much dangerous wildlife roaming around. I have had to use the repellents a couple of times, but only twice, I think, and we are in our 15th spring here. I did find gopher mounds out back in a sandy soil area where we are putting in a new garden this year (our original garden is mostly clay) and I am concerned I'll have trouble with them back there, but just will deal with it when and if it occurs. One sure sign you have gophers is that you'll walk outside one day and there will be a gap where a plant once stood. This most commonly occurs right after you have set out transplants in the garden. Disappearing plants that are totally gone as if they'd never been there at all are a sign of gophers. For some reason, at our house they really like to eat periwinkle plants and lemon balm plants. Just read and follow the label directions on the bottle of repellent if you choose to go that route. There also are poison pellets available at farm supply stores, but I garden as organically as I can and we have pets and wildlife so poison pellets are not something I'd ever use. The box traps I'm most familiar with have a name like Gopher-Getter, but there are other metal traps that some people use. You can find the mole and gopher repellents at any big box store like Wal-Mart, Lowe's or Home Depot. Here near our house, the rodents usually start popping up in February and all the stores sell out of the repellents, and then you have to wait for more to come in, but generally it is back in stock pretty quickly. There are many brands of mole/gopher repellents that contain castor oil. The one I am linking is the one I usually see in the stores down here in southern OK or in western North Texas. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Example of a Mole/Gopher Repellent Product

I think that's a killdeer or sandpiper or something else--it doesn't look like a whippoorwill--not that I would have found it anyway. I saw the cat right away in today's puzzle, but is there another critter? There is something fuzzy on the AC unit--kind of looks like a bird. raven, what do you see in the other room?

I can't, either, Fun2BHere, and the glasses I use for the PC monitor are only a few months old. Sometimes I wonder if some of these pictures are 90% (or more) imagination. But then again, some are almost too easy. I do have fun looking for whatever, though, frustrating as it is sometimes. Rusty